


Things You Said

by anonstarbuck



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s05e04 Detour, Episode: s06e19 The Unnatural, Episode: s07e10 Sein Und Zeit, Fluff, Post-Episode: s07e04 Millenium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-19 05:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7347709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonstarbuck/pseuds/anonstarbuck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things you said...prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Things You Said Before You Kissed Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Unnatural

“Shut up, Mulder. I’m playing baseball.”

He smiles into her hair and watches the balls fly into the air and get lost in the sky amongst the twinkling stars. He likes to think that they were shooting light into space, illuminating the darkness there. That he is somehow saluting Josh Exley with twenty-one potential home runs, and where sliding home means holding Scully between his arms, in the middle, an extension of himself, a limb that felt natural and necessary and true.

He feels how her feet swing off the ground followed with the satisfying crack of the bat against the ball, and too soon, way too soon, poor-boy signals his watch to let him know that it is his bedtime, tips his hat and runs off into the night with a trail of dust that only small boys can kick up.

She makes no effort to move away from him, and they both hold their stance as if waiting for another pitch, except that the bat is facing down towards the ground, as if he's about to stake it to the ground as a claim of land.

“What did you learn today, Scully?” he murmurs into her jawline. He doesn’t need to see her face to know that she is smiling, closed-lipped and softly. One of his favourites.

“That you’re a sucker for baseball, that you have a thing for Mickey Mantle and that, actually, you’re a sucker in general.”

He inhales deeply, enjoying the laughter in her voice and wishing that the lights of the batting cage would shut off so that they could look at the stars a little more clearly, or that the celestial elements above could be witness to the moment which he still can’t believe is actually happening. _She’s right_ , he thinks to himself. _I am a sucker_.

“How am I a sucker?” he asks quietly, nose in her hair.  He knows the answer but he wants to keep whispering into her ear on the baseball dust.

“Did you really believe that I’d never played baseball?”

He chuckles and and breathes her in.  "You’ve known me a while now, Scully. I want to believe.“

She laughs this time and presses herself against him, nuzzling his chest with her back, her head against his clavicle. He can feel her thinking, not with the furrowed brows she saves for the office, but in the way where her breath hitches slightly when she’s about to make a decision.

“Also, hips before hands.” And she turns around, pressing her hipbones against the top of his thighs and then tentatively snakes her fingers up his torso to cup his face with her hands and stroke the space next to his ears that had become hers. He never knew he loved that part of his body until she had touched it.

“Thank you, Mulder,” she murmurs tenderly and the pitch is made. They move together, him leaning down while she tilts her face to meet his. Contact, sweeter than the bat striking the ball. She pulls him closer and opens her mouth to let him in. The rush of blood in his head sounds like the cheering of crowds. His heart swells, makes a lap around the bases of his breastbone.

Homerun. Home.


	2. Things You Said Over the Phone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Detour

She leaves her phone at arm’s reach that night because she likes answering on the first ring. Not because she’s afraid it’s an emergency or thinks that Mulder is in any particular kind of hurry, but because she loves to be beckoned out of sleep by the cadence of his voice. She likes to keep her eyes closed and feel the syrupy gruffness of his tone walk her into wakefulness– because what better way to bridge dreams to consciousness than to listen to the protagonist of both.

“Hi,” she murmurs, half into the pillow and half into his ear.

“How did you know it was me?” She can feel him reaching for a sunflower seed in the darkness, knows that he’s sitting quietly in the gloom.

“Because it’s always you, Mulder,” she answers, eyes still closed but mouth opening to let out a small exhale which is meant as mock annoyance but sounds more like contentment.

“I can’t sleep, Scully.”

“Shocker,” she retorts and opens her eyes then, blinking sleepily into the darkness and trying to imagine what he might be wearing. “Have you changed your bandages?”

“I did, doc. If I’m to survive the attack of a mothman, the least I can do is avoid death from infection. It would mean your vigil was in vain, and that would be a shame.” He grins at the rhyme and into the receiver: “We’ll always have that tower of bodies, though.” 

He stops briefly and his voice deepens to a husky sultriness she’s become more and more aware of or less and less immune to– she’s still not sure which. “I’ve never done that with a woman before” he admits playfully.

“It was my first time too,” she says, less flirtatiously than she’d like to dare. “I’d never sung to someone before either. It was a nice trip to the woods, Mulder, filled with firsts. And no killer insects. I’d say a win.”

He bites his tongue in order to incite speech rather than to keep from speaking. He takes a plunge with his next breath, he leaps.

“If it had rained sleeping bags it could’ve been another first.”

Medically speaking, Scully knows that her heart won’t stop beating from just a statement, but she swears for a split second that it has, only to return to life by loudly pounding possibility against her breastbone.

“You got me to sing to you, Mulder. That’s something,” she whispers and thinks about how she cradled him and his warmth seeped into her lap or her warmth seeped into his torso. All she knows is that there was heat, like there always is, despite the forest cold.

“It was something indeed, Scully.” And after a beat, “Would you sing to me again?”

She blushes and presses her face against the pillow with pleased embarrassment. Life is always a paradox with him.

“Mulder, no”

She can see his puppy face, his pout pouring into the little holes of the receiver.

“Please.”

She shakes her head as if he could see her. She is thankful for her remission, for having Mulder ask her to do things without the unspoken fear that it might be the last time that she could. She likes that she could hold him that night and care for him and be strong, not for his sake, but for his own safety, as partners, as friends, and as that title tugging at her tongue that she couldn’t yet admit to herself. She’s happy that she doesn’t have to worry about bleeding on her shoes and her shirts and on the spare napkins he took to carrying in his pockets while she was sick. She’s not ready to say what she wants to say yet. Much less over the phone, but she is ready to let him know.

“If I were the queen of the world, tell you what I’d do, I’d throw away the cars and the bars and the wars and make sweet love to you.”

She pauses and holds her breath. She can feel him sigh or inhale, again she’s not sure which, on the other end.

“Scully….”

“Yes, Mulder?”

She can hear the promise in his next statement:

“Chorus.”


	3. Things You Said Too Quietly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sein und Zeit

She stands in the hallway leaning her forehead against the door, the 42 crowning her hair like a tiara of blood and bad news. She straightens and tugs at her blazer, looking there for a semblance of togetherness.

She presses her fingers roughly against her closed eyelids until she see stars and tries to imagine that this is what it’s like to be Mulder. That if you press hard enough, if you set-aside the pain for a moment, those flashing lights and stars in the darkness of your mind’s eye can be the answer to the questions that, before you met him, had never even thought, or dared, to ask.

Her hands are pink and raw. Despite washing repeatedly and having pragmatic knowledge that this was just a psychological reaction, she feels that she has been unable to wash the scent of Teena Mulder’s dead body off of herself. She has showered and scoured, trying not to cry at the thought of wearing his mother’s corpse on her skin, as if he could smell the dead on her like a cornered animal. Fox, she thinks, and knocks on the door.

Her body is stiff and rim-rod straight as she listens to him patiently, talking about conspiracies, and letter-writing and missing children and all she can hear in the background is the timbre of a prayer. To give death reason. She only intervenes when he finishes with a grief-struck “And that’s why they killed her.”

No Mulder.

She has been a source of science and reason since childhood. Her faith has helped her give death reason, her medical background to give reason for death. He needs her science, not her faith, although he still doesn’t always understand how these two are inextricably intertwined in her. Right now he needs seven years of trust and partnership, and their mutual search for the truth.

“Mulder your mother killed herself.”

She holds him as he cries and wonders if this is the way to hold a man together, by leaning into him and cradling his head against your womb. She strokes his hair and his back until she feels him hiccup and her eyes water dangerously. Broken men weep and hiccup exactly like little boys do.

She leads him to the couch and lies down with him, cradling his face against her breast, leaving soft kisses on his hairline.

“What now?” he whispers hoarsely and she worries briefly about how small his voice sounds.

“You have me.” she mouths into his hair and although she knows that it’s impossible for him to have heard, his hand presses her more tightly against himself.

“Scully,” and she feels his tears on her blouse and her tears on his hair and her name is uttered like ancient, sad magic on his lips– part invocation, part plea.

“I’m staying, Mulder.” she murmurs into his temple. “I’m not leaving.”

And she means it, as in forever, as in I love you, I’m here.

He’s asleep by then, but she wants to believe that he heard her through exhausted grief.

She thinks of Douglas Adams, of how he says that the answer to every question in the universe is 42. She looks down on his face softly glowing under the light of the fish tank and gently rubs her thumb between his eyebrows, to smooth out the furrow there. She was never one for science-fiction, but she now knows that there is some truth in Hitchhiker’s Guide. The answer to what she wants, to what she was always missing. Yes, it’s true. The answer is in 42.


	4. Things You Said After You Kissed Me/When You Thought I Was Asleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Millennium

The purr of the engine stops short in front of his Alexandria apartment and they both sit in silence in the heated car, wounded and a little shy. Her neck is pulsing with a dull throb of pain and Scully touches the marks gingerly. She feels his eyes scrutinise the way she probes at the angry bruising there and suddenly the car feels too warm and the way she expertly massages her fingers against her skin seems too intimate for him to be watching.   
  
His eyes have a strange sheen to them as he reaches into his left-hand pocket and pulls out a bag of sunflower seeds and a yellow prescription bottle.  “I can share all of my stash with you, Scully. I’m sure my doctor won’t mind.”   
  
She turns to look at him and purses her lips with pretend disapproval. “Your doctor does mind, Mulder. Those pills are for your arm, my neck is just sore. You, on the other hand, have some actual tearing.”  
  
“Tearing-schmering. Plus, sharing is caring.”  
  
He sing-songs as much as his dry monotone allows him and puts his things back inside his pocket, wincing slightly. “We can take some of the edge off together. Celebrate the new year and the fact that we saw zombies. Zombies, Scully! It’s the year 2000 and you saved me from the undead.”  
  
“Mulder, I…..” she begins and he widens his eyes predicting the deductive spiel that’s about to spill from her mouth.   
  
“Don’t, please. Don’t give me the science and the hard facts tonight. It’s the first day of a brand new year. Let’s change it up a little.” he looks at her pleadingly but not without humour. “Plus,” he hesitates while trying to catch her eye with his, “the world didn’t end.”  
  
She feels the blush on her face and touches her tongue to where his lips were  pressed against an hour earlier like a pledge.  _No, it didn’t._  
  
“Come upstairs with me, Scully. Make sure I take my meds and help me put my pjs on. Watch Ghostbusters II with me.”  
  
Mulder’s voice is genuine and warm and inviting and she finds herself saying yes while making a smartass remark that they both know he doesn’t own any pyjamas.   
  
“Help me anyways,” he murmurs and she can feel that he is staring at her lips the way that she is staring at this brand-new year. Somewhat hesitant but with stead-fast love and free-reined lust.   
  
They’re both under his Navajo blanket and both are quietly thankful that he always took the right side of the couch because, somehow, they have slipped into the sweet nervous comfort of first dates. He had shifted his good arm around her shoulders and pulled her against himself as they watched Sigourney Weaver retouch a creepy-looking painting on the screen.   
  
“We’re not that different from the ghostbusters, you know,” he says to her while taking a swig from the beer she knows he shouldn’t be mixing with his medication. “They were separated from each other and blamed for things that weren’t their fault after saving the city from paranormal danger too.”  
  
She grins but does not look at him, her eyes enraptured by slime coming up into Weaver’s apartment through the bathtub. She acknowledges at the screen, “If I were that Dana, I’d never take a bath again.”  
  
“You’re always welcome to take baths here,” he insinuates in her direction and she feels her breath hitch, her chest tighten.  
  
She decides that the new millennium is a time for courage, math geek be damned. She licks her upper lips and asks, “Would that make me the Dana Barrett to your Peter Venkman?” and she wants to kick herself for asking in the same voice that Marcus had used to ask her out on a date the first time, clipped, flat and insecure.   
  
He kisses her again then, and she is grateful that his arm was already around her shoulder, so that when she slides her tongue out to meet his, he doesn’t have to break contact or wince with pain. He scatters light kisses on her upper lip and cheeks and punctuates the last of them with one on the tip of her roman nose. “We’re a much better team, and better-looking as well.”  
  
“Thank you, Mulder,” she says genuinely,  “I’m well aware of how hot you thought she was as Ellen Ripley,” she murmurs while jutting her chin at Sigourney Weaver, and he grins at her knowledge.  
  
“How much under the blanket-over the clothes action does that win me, Scully?” He nudges her face with his nose, careful of her neck and she laughs at his easy flirting, his shamelessness.  
  
“None, I’m afraid. Not with that arm,” and he pretends to be hurt, but they both grin at each other madly with the promise hidden behind the statement. The potential nakedness underneath a scratchy blanket in the future is there, and they both know it. She listens to him speak about ectoplasm and art-restoration, about  New York subway lines and the origin of Auld Lang Syne and dozes off.   
  
She wakes up to him adjusting the blankets around her while whispering “157 haikus, Scully. Can you believe it? Not even normal poetry. Haikus. I guess I wanted to write it in a way that reflected you.”  
  
She’s confused but not for long. She’s seen him scribbling small notes on post-its and then place them inside his briefcase or coat pockets. She can understand why he chose haikus. They are small, but complex, with juxtaposing elements. Quiet, strong and often beautiful. She is overwhelmed with tenderness and she can feel him shaking his head in disbelief.   
  
“157 haikus for me or about me, Mulder?” she mumbles without opening her eyes, knowing that there are some embarrassments that even Fox Mulder can’t take. He’s silent and she knows he’s watching her face closely, trying to read in it any sign of disapproval or rejection. She knows the night for him doesn’t just bring about bad dreams but also disquiet and self-doubt. She keeps her face soft and breathes evenly.  
  
“Both.” The answer cuts through the darkness like a warm blade and she smiles, knowing that he’s smiling too, he’s been caught and it’s ok.   
  
“What’s number one?” she sighs as she feels him settle next to her and snake his good arm around her waist.   
  
_The robe dropped and I_  
_tried not to cry as she peered_  
_trustingly at me._


	5. Things You Said as We Danced in Our Socks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rush

Scully parks her car outside the Georgetown apartment and raises her eyebrow to high heavens. The question mark curve of her brow has always been the hook, her voice the reel. He watches as her eyes shift towards his car, parked halfway down the block. The right eyebrow is followed by the left and the question is asked across her forehead.  
  
He answers, “I’m staying,” and adds , “if that’s alright with you” and he grins as she fakes nonchalance but does a piss-poor job of hiding her satisfaction.  
  
“You might as well. It’s late.”  
  
His stomach tingles with the knowledge that he doesn’t need an overnight bag. His presence has been quietly seeping into her home like the tide. Their relationship is at a three quarters crescent, bright enough to shine on them shyly, but still there are unspoken questions asked, permissions granted.  
  
He treads two steps behind her as he watches her walk to the door and stops, silhouetted against the doorway, a half-shadow still not quite used to the permanent invitation to come in. She switches on the light and silently motions for him to turn around. He shrugs off his trench coat like an afterthought and stares as she hangs it next to her significantly smaller one.  
  
“Are you hungry?” she asks, aware that the question might as well be rhetorical. He only seems to eat when she’s around and she’s realised that he never says no to food. She had wondered at first if what appealed to him was the domesticity of it rather than the meal in itself. She quickly learned that she was right. Mulder surrenders to home-cooked meals and queen-sized beds like a bone-tired soldier fighting a 20-year war.  
  
“Make yourself at home,” she tosses over her shoulder and goes into her bedroom. When she comes out a few minutes later, her face is naked and freckled and she’s wearing cotton pyjamas and thick woollen socks. She catches him looking at her spice rack as if it were a veritable X-File, the cumin a form of conjuring dust.  
  
When he turns to her his breath deepens to drink in the view. Carefree, domestic Scully still feels like a privilege most days. He smirks and quips, “Using the heavy artillery, there? You know how hard it is for me to resist you in oversized flannel.”  
  
He doesn’t need to see her to know that she’s trying not to laugh as she turns on the radio to an oldies station. She touches her hair flirtatiously and combined with the blue of her pyjamas he decides that this is his favourite look on her.  
  
“Would you rather I wore a purple and yellow letter jacket and pranced around my highschool while eye-fucking older FBI agents?”  
  
 Her eyebrow has quirked again and he takes the bait. “I’d rather you wore your own old school uniform while you eye-fuck this male FBI agent.” He inspects her closely, “Didn’t you go to a Catholic school?”  
  
“Green plaid skirts and white knee socks. No secret cave that gave us superhuman speed though.” She purses her lips and tugs at his tie for a second time that week. “Just eye-fucking?”  
  
He feels the blood rush to his groin and laughs, “Hopefully not just that. Scully… you in that getup? Leave the superhuman speed to me. I don’t think I’d be able to go slow.” She smiles and steps closer to him. “I’ll keep that in mind,” and briefly squeezes him before starting to chop the zucchini.  
  
He stands behind her and whispers into the top of her head. “I feel a little overdressed.” She glances back at him to take in his suit and work shoes, his loosened not-so-ugly tie. “I think you may be right, Mulder,” and moves on to slice a red pepper with surgical skill. When she turns again to set the vegetables on the table, she tosses her head back and laughs her deep-throated laugh at the sight of him shirtless, in boxers, with his black work socks still on.  
  
“Perfect,” and her close-lipped smile is soft. He opens his arms and she steps in and they both marvel at the fit. Unlikely tetris shapes coming together in symmetry. He settles his chin on her head and she nuzzles the spot where his clavicle connects with his breastbone. They sway slowly to the music, dinner forgotten, and sigh contentedly in tandem.  
  
He feels as she inhales sharply at the new song that comes on and her hands grip him a little tighter, as if making sure that he stays put.She thinks back on the time when she was staring into the water filled with grief, and appalled at what she thought was too lowly a funeral. She remembers her mother’s voice tremulous with emotion, telling her that this song was playing when her father had returned and proposed to her– both so young, so filled with the future.  
  
As she sings the lyrics of the song in her head, she remembers a night when she had held Mulder in a careful embrace and had thought of their survival, of her budding love for him. She places the tip of her woollen socks on his toes and looks up to touch her nose to his endearingly large one. His eyes flutter open when she presses her lips softly to his.  
__  
Somewhere beyond the sea  
_Somewhere waiting for me_  
_My lover stands on golden sands_  
  
She wriggles her toes the way she did as a child on the beach and feels Mulder’s feet solid underneath hers. “I love you” she mouths against his chest, and she knows by the soft breath against her hair, that he’s saying it back.


End file.
